Page 1381 - Week 04 - Thursday, 30 March 2017
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jurisdictions. I heard what Mr Parton said, and when we compare it to the wages that are being paid in the ACT to low income earners, of course it is not affordable. We all need to keep working hard to make sure that we can provide opportunities for everybody to get into a home of their own.
But it is not just a local responsibility. I will come to that in a moment. The things that we need to be aware of include the ability to hold down a job, provide for the needs of kids and feel part of the city. These are all critical parts of feeling secure and comfortable in your own community. For some, keeping up with rent or mortgage payments is a daily challenge. This is true for people right here in Canberra, particularly casual workers, including hospitality and retail workers.
Like Mr Parton, I grew up in public housing. Most of my friends were in public housing, although none of us knew that we were in public housing. We were all just the same. As I have said in this place, we did not judge each other by the housing that we lived in. After that, I spent 15 years working to help people who worked in the retail and hospitality sectors to get better wages and conditions and ease some of the pressure that they face when renting in an affluent city like our own.
We have talked about wages and penalty rates here in this Assembly. Whilst we all understand that it is not the jurisdiction of this government, it is absolutely appropriate to discuss those matters in this place, because wages policy is just one area where the position of the commonwealth flows directly to the lives of people in our own community, these low income earners who are our neighbours, our friends or our family. Their children may go to the same school as our children. They go to the same shops, use the same community facilities and transport, and are largely indistinguishable from members in this Assembly. Many are providing the services in retail, hospitality, health care, cleaning, security and emergency response that we all depend on.
Improving affordable housing options will particularly help low income households. They include single-parent households, people who are often disadvantaged and experiencing housing stress in the private rental market. I am one of those single parents, but before I came here my wage was much less than it is now. I was spending more than I earned, with two children under 10. I have not forgotten what that was like, and my job in this place is to make the lives of people in the same situation as mine easier than it was for me. That is where we need to be going when we are doing the work in this place and addressing issues like housing and housing affordability. They include women who are systemically disadvantaged, particularly women escaping domestic and family violence, women caring for their children as a single parent, older women and women with a disability. And they include older women who struggle to afford the costs associated with supportive, secure and long-term accommodation that will allow them to age in place.
ACTCOSS, Shelter and the Youth Coalition have contributed to important local research on this issue. Their findings have confirmed that many lower income households in the ACT remain in housing stress, particularly in the private rental market, with people paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. What we
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